Phil and Emily are joined by writer and podcaster Katharine LaRonde to dig into Joe Roth's America's Sweethearts (2001). Julia Roberts plays the overlooked assistant stuck managing the press junket for her superstar sister (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and her sister's washed-up, soon-to-be-ex-husband (John Cusack), whose divorce turns out to be the only story the reporters actually want. It spirals into a movie that can't decide if it's mocking the junket circus or just running one.

The three dig into the film's Hollywood-satire instincts that never quite land a punch, John Cusack playing a guy who's spent a year and a half hiding from his own life at Alan Arkin's wellness retreat, and Roger Ebert's read on the movie as a watered-down Singin' in the Rain. There's a real case here for reading America's Sweethearts as the movie that wanted to skewer Hollywood but fell in love with it instead. Promising, self-conscious, and never quite committed, same as the movie.

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